1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the delivery of web content. More particularly, the present invention relates to the delivery of dynamic web content.
2. Background Art
The Internet, and packet networks in general, have become increasingly important sources of content for consumers seeking access to information and entertainment. The content available on an Internet website, for example, is typically presented to a consumer via one or more web pages, which may be loaded and displayed on a client device used by the consumer. Because, initially, the content provided on a web page took the form of relatively static data, the formatting and presentation protocols developed to facilitate information delivery were optimized for presentation of such data. Thus, a top-level page load of a selected host web page typically included data that determined and fixed rather precisely the content to be rendered and displayed to the consumer.
Determination of the content presented on a host page usually extended both to primary content, such as content comprising a central theme of the host page, and to secondary content, such as advertising content or other ancillary content associated with the primary content by, for example, the primary or secondary content provider. In order to update any content displayed on the page, a top-level page transition in the form of a reload of the original host page, was generally required. Moreover, access to additional content related to the primary content initially presented on the host page, but not included on the host page, typically required a top-level transition to another web page.
The sophistication of both consumers and the content providers utilizing packet networks has broadened substantially since the content delivery protocols geared to primarily static content were introduced, however. Today's savvy and increasingly demanding consumers desire access to frequently updated information, and have increasingly lofty expectations of the richness and immediacy of packet network provided content. Primary content providers, seeking to meet these enhanced consumer expectations, have found the conventional static format too constraining. As a result, much of the primary content presently being provided has been developed using formats more enabling of the dynamic, rich media experience preferred by consumers.
The evolution of primary content, from an almost exclusively static to an increasingly dynamic presentation format, has altered the way in which that content is substituted or updated. For example, whereas, in the past, updates to or substitution of primary content located on a presently loaded host page required reloading the page, or making a top-level transition to another page, that is no longer the case. Today, primary content is often dynamically delivered to a presently loaded host page without requiring a top-level page transition, be it a reload or navigation to a separate page. These changes to the manner in which primary content is delivered to a consumer interacting with a host page has given rise to unresolved challenges to providers of advertising and other forms of secondary content associated with the host page.
For example, one conventional approach to delivering secondary content, such as advertising content, has been to have predetermined secondary content load concurrently with primary content during top-level page load on the client system. Alternatively, another conventional approach delivers metadata concurrently with the primary content provided during top-level page load. That metadata may contain information instructing the client system to place a request for specific secondary content from a specific source, and directing the client system as to how to render the secondary content on the host page. Other conventional approaches may vary in the precise mechanism used to identify and request the secondary content accompanying a host page, but all of those conventional techniques typically operate only during top-level page transitions, or are triggered by those events.
Thus, conventional approaches have tied updates and substitutions to secondary content to top-level page transitions as a proxy for identifying updates and substitutions to primary content directly. Although those approaches may have been effective in keeping updates to secondary content in step with updates to primary content when the primary content was primarily static, they are no longer effective in doing so. Consequently, although, for example, advertisers have invested substantial resources in delivering the type of secondary advertising content identified as desirable to the consumers they seek to attract, by associating the secondary advertising content with primary content of interest to those consumers, that strategy may increasingly be rendered ineffective by the described changes to primary content delivery.
Accordingly, there is a need to overcome the drawbacks and deficiencies in the art by providing a more efficient solution enabling delivery of secondary content updates, in order to provide timely and topical secondary content to consumers.